Page 31 - Council Journal Autumn 2019

FEATURE Leadership Agenda
A LEADERSHIP AGENDA FOR THE NEXT DECADE
The winners in business have • shifted markedly in the last
decade. When the 2010s
began, the world’s ten most
Technology is beginning to redefine the nature of work, as well as the relationship between the company and the individual, as both employee and customer.
equally critical challenges in the 2020s—and would do well to learn from each other’s strengths.
valuable public companies by market capitalisation were based in five
countries, only two of them were in • the tech sector, and none was worth
The rise of China is challenging the global economic order and the institutions and rules that have defined it.
Many of today’s leading tech companies have succeeded by building highly scalable digital platforms. But as purely digital opportunities are depleted (especially the opportunity to dominate broad, consumer-oriented digital ecosystems), new opportunities will come increasingly from combining digital technology with existing physical assets. To succeed, digital natives will need to embrace the messier world of specialised assets and industrial customers. They will also need to “come of age” by managing leadership transitions, avoiding the bureaucracy and inertia that generally come with greater size and a longer history, and developing new strategies to preserve trust among users and society at large— challenges that traditional companies have considerably more experience with.
more than $400 billion. Today, all of
the top ten are in the US and China,
the majority are tech companies, and • some at least temporarily have
surpassed $1 trillion in value.
Long-term global growth projections have been falling, driven in part by an ongoing deceleration in working-age population growth across major economies.
Given the relentlessness of change on multiple dimensions, the keys to success are likely to be just as different in ten years’ time. What will it take to win in the 2020s?
•
Society is increasingly scrutinising the social impact of technology and the sustainability and broader contribution of business.
Emerging challenges will reshape business
• Investor activism and the role of private capital are rising in many parts of the world.
• The future competitive environment will likely be shaped by multiple trends that are already unfolding today:
• The combination of these forces is producing multidimensional uncertainty, which confounds traditional forecasting and planning-based approaches for harnessing the future.
• Artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing, and pioneers are advancing beyond spot applications to implement AI at scale.
Meanwhile, a new era of competition will provide an opportunity for the resurgence of some incumbents. But the ones that succeed in the 2020s will look very different than they do today—they will have evolved their businesses to harness new technologies and reshaped their external relationships, organisations, and approaches accordingly.
• Businesses are increasingly organised into multicompany “ecosystems” that defy traditional industry boundaries and blur the distinction between competitors and collaborators, and producers and consumers.
To stay ahead of these trends, leaders need to question their current assumptions and retool their companies for the coming decade. This goes for both traditional incumbents and younger digital giants, who will face very different but
Council Journal 31